VS 2010 Licensing Changes

The big news, along with the announcement of VS 2010 Beta 2 availability, are all the licensing changes that go along with it. I won’t go into all of them here because it’s pretty long. I just want to communicate the philosophy and the high points. Our pre-sales web sites will have more detailed information for you.

Over the past several years we’ve gotten feedback that the VS/VSTS/TFS SKU line up was too complicated and it is unclear what is the right thing to buy. We’ve also gotten feedback that people want a long term successor to SourceSafe that modernized the team development environment even for very small teams.

The result is a significant shakeup in the line-up. The proliferation of “role” and VS SKUs has been simplified down to 4 basic developer choices:

Express

Professional

Premium

Ultimate

Each includes everything in the lower edition and then adds more. Pro, Premium and Ultimate can come with MSDN. We also offer “Test Elements” for testers that don’t need to write code. TFS remains available as a stand alone product but the server and a CAL is also included in MSDN subscriptions with VS Pro, Premium and Ultimate. Further the stand-alone TFS price is being significantly reduced.

To help transition people from the products they currently own, we are also including a program called the “Ultimate Upgrade” which will allow most users to upgrade a level in the SKU hierarchy at no charge when we launch.

Again, there are a lot of details in the licensing changes that I won’t try to cover. I’ll cover some more TFS licensing details in the next month or two.